1911 Sep 18, Russian Premier
Piotr Stolypin (b.1862) died four days after being shot at the Kiev
opera house by socialist lawyer Dimitri Bogroff. As governor of the
Saratov province, Stolypin ruthlessly suppressed local peasant
uprisings, and helped to squelch the revolutionary upheavals of
1905.
(HN,
9/18/98)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Stolypin)

1911 Mikhail Larionov and
Natalia Goncharova developed rayonism (rayonnism), a style of
abstract art, after hearing a series of lectures about Futurism by
Marinetti in Moscow. The Rayonists sought an art that floated beyond
abstraction, outside of time and space, and to break the barriers
between the artist and the public.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayonism)

1911 Mendel Beilis was tried on
charges of killing a Russian child to extract its blood for baking
Passover matzos. He spent over 2 years in prison before a jury found
him not guilty. Franz Kafka followed the story and may have
transformed it into a universal symbol of arbitrary victimization in
his "The Trial."
(WSJ, 10/17/00, p.A20)

1911 Russia exported 13.7
million tons of grain while some 30 million of its peasants suffered
from famine.
(SFC, 7/11/98, p.B3)

1912 May 5, The Soviet
Communist Party newspaper Pravda began publishing. Iosif
Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili took the name Stalin, meaning "man of
steel," about the time he helped found the Russian Communist
newspaper Pravda. Stalin specialized in writing about national
minorities in Russia and went on to become editor of Pravda.
(HN, 5/5/98)(HN, 12/21/98)(HNQ, 4/6/00)

1912 The novella “Hadji Murad"
by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was published. Murad (d.1852) was an
important Chechen leader during the resistance of the Caucasian
peoples in 1711-1864 against the Russian Empire's seizure of the
region.
(http://tinyurl.com/js9od)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadji_Murad)

1912 The Pushkin Museum opened
in Moscow. It was scheduled to close in 2009 for a $380 million
upgrade to be completed in 2012.
(WSJ, 5/21/08, p.D9)

1912 The Saint Nicholas
Cathedral in Nice, with its two pointed spires and five
crucifix-topped onion-shaped domes, was built under Nicholas II,
nearly 50 years after his grandfather, Alexander II, bought the land
it sits on.
(AP, 1/20/10)

1913 Kazimir Malevich
(1878-1935), Ukraine born artist, designed the costumes for the
opera “Victory Over the Sun."
(Econ, 10/26/13, p.96)(Econ, 12/21/13, SR p.5)
1913 Phillip Malyavin, Russian
artist, painted the portrait "Dancing woman."
(WSJ, 5/2/03, p.W6)
1913 The Faberge Imperial rock
crystal egg with rose cut diamonds set in platinum was created for
the Czar. An American in 1994 paid $5.5 mil for the egg. Only 56
eggs were commissioned by the czars and czarinas.
(SFEM, 6/9/96, p.19)
1913 Vladimir Mayakovsky,
futurist poet, authored "Mayakovsky: A Tragedy."
(SFC, 8/12/00, p.B1)
1913 Three Russian ships sailed
to the Greek island of Athos and bundled hundreds of Orthodox monks
off to Odessa. The Russians feared that a dispute over reciting the
name of Jesus Christ would lead to the expulsion of all Russians
from Athos. The name dispute began in 1907 when the book “In the
Mountains of the Caucasus" was written by a monk named Ilarion.
(Econ, 12/22/12, p.89)
1913 The US firm
Harley-Davidson opened its 1st motorcycle dealership in St.
Petersburg, Russia. It closed in 1917. In 2005 it opened a new
dealership opened in Moscow.
(SFC, 5/13/05, p.C2)

1914 Jan 16, Maxim Gorky was
authorized to return to Russia after an eight year exile for
political dissidence.
(HN, 1/16/99)

1914 Feb 26, Russian aviator
Igor Sikorsky carried 17 passengers in a twin engine plane in St.
Petersburg. Igor Sikorsky, founder of Sikorsky Aircraft, produced a
film in 1942 that promoted the capabilities of his VS-300
helicopter, highlighting its possible rescue and military
applications.
(HN, 2/26/98)

1914 Aug 1, Germany declared
war on Russia at the onset of World War I.
(AP, 8/1/07)

1914 Aug 2, Russian troops
invade Eastern Prussia.
(MC, 8/2/02)

1914 Aug 3, German Admiral
Souchon, commander of the battle cruisers Goeben and Breslau,
received an unexpected change in his orders. After attacking the
Algerian coast he was no longer to sail west to the Atlantic Ocean.
Instead, he was now ordered to turn around and sail east to Turkey.
His new mission was to persuade the neutral Turkish government to
enter the war on the side of Germany. The 2 ships were sold to
Turkey and Souchon was made commander of the Turkish navy. He took
the ships into the Black Sea, where he bombarded the Russian cities
of Odessa, Sebastopol and Novorossiysk without the knowledge or
consent of the Turkish government.
(http://www.worldwar1.com/sfgb.htm)(ON, Dec,
1995)

1914 Aug 6, Austria-Hungary
declared war against Russia and Serbia declared war against Germany.
(AP, 8/6/00)

1914 Nov 25, Hindenburg called
off Lodz offensive 40 miles from Warsaw, Poland. The Russians lost
90,000 to the Germans’ 35,000 in two weeks of fighting.
(HN, 11/25/98)

1915 Feb 10, President Wilson
blasted the British for using the U.S. flag on merchant ships to
deceive the Germans. He also warned the Kaiser that he would hold
Germany "to a strict accountability" for U.S. lives and property
endangered. In Europe [Lithuania], the Germans encircled and
captured 100,000 Russians near Nieman River. When the United States
entered World War I, propagandist George Creel set out to stifle
anti-war sentiment.
(HN, 2/10/97)

1915 Apr 24-May 14, Turkey said
Armenians had sided with Russia and issued a deportation order for
the mass deportation of Armenians. Armenian organizations in
Istanbul were closed and 235 members were arrested for treason.
Turkish police arrested hundreds of the most prominent Armenians in
Constantinople, took them into the hinterlands and shot them. With
that the terror spread through "Turkish Armenia" spearheaded by the
"Special Organization" of soldiers of the Turkish leader Enver. In
2006 Taner Akcam authored “A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and
the Question of Turkish Responsibility."
(AP, 4/24/97)(HN, 4/24/98)(SFC, 4/27/99,
p.A10)(HNQ, 5/30/99)(Econ, 10/21/06, p.95)

1915 Kasimir Malevich
(1878-1935), Ukraine born pioneer of abstract art, painted
"Suprematist Cross in Black Square." It featured a dark black square
against a white background and was "emblematic of the avant-garde
belief that abstraction penetrated to the essence of things, on
which basis the world could be reinvented."
(SFC, 5/28/98, p.E5)(WSJ, 10/5/05, p.D14)(Econ,
10/26/13, p.96)

1915 Ingush and Chechen
regiments led "the Brusilov breakthrough" on the Russian-German
front. Their horse cavalry attacked an enemy force armed with heavy
artillery.
(www.chechnyafree.ru)

1916 Jan 18, The Russians
forced the Turkish 3rd Army back to Erzurum.
(HN, 1/18/99)

1916 Jan 29, Grigori Rasputin,
Russian mystic, shaman, grubby peasant, and influential favorite of
the Romanov court, survived a failed attempt to poison him. Prince
Felix Yussoupov, an effete, wealthy young aristocrat, shot and
killed Rasputin and in effect, brought down the Russian Empire. The
prince dined out on his story for many decades, becoming a jet-set
celebrity. He restored his old wealth, lost in the Soviet
Revolution, by suing anyone who wrote about Rasputin without his
permission. [see Dec 16, Dec 30, 1916]
(MC, 1/29/02)

1916 Dec 16, Gregory Rasputin
(45), the Russian monk and confidant to Czarina Alexandra, was
assassinated by Prince Yussoupov (Youssoupoff). The monk who had
wielded powerful influence over the Russian court, was murdered by a
group of noblemen. He was fed cakes and wine laced with cyanide,
then shot a number of times and finally drowned. In 1957 Youssoupoff
(d.1967) authored a memoir in France that in 2003 was translated
into English: Lost Splendor: The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who
Killed Rasputin." A TV version of Rasputin was made for HBO in 1996.
[see Dec 30]
(WSJ, 3/25/96, p.A-15)(AP, 12/16/97)(SSFC,
11/30/03, p.M4)

1916 Dec 29, According to the
New Style calendar (Dec. 16th by the Old Style), Grigory Rasputin,
the so-called "Mad Monk" who had wielded great influence with Czar
Nicholas II, was murdered by a group of Russian noblemen in St.
Petersburg. Rasputin drowned when he was thrown through a hole in
the ice of the Neva River. When Rasputin was introduced to the
Russian royal family in 1905, he demonstrated an ability to heal the
royal son Alexis and was then welcomed into the family circle.
Rasputin was considered a holy peasant, but his belief that sinning
was necessary for salvation led him to seduce women and other
scandalous behavior. A conspiracy, believing Rasputin had too much
influence on the empress, formed to assassinate him, and on the
night of December 29-30, they poisoned his wine--but he did not die.
They shot him twice, but when he still refused to die, they drowned
him.
(HNPD, 12/30/98)(AP, 12/29/06)

1916 A Russian submarine sank
off Sweden’s eastern coast after it collided with a Swedish ship in
poor visibility, killing all 18 crew members. Wreckage of the
submarine was found in 2015.
(Reuters, 7/28/15)

1917 Feb 28, Russian Duma set
up a Provisional Committee; workers set up Soviets.
(MC, 2/28/02)

1917 Mar 8, Russian
women commenced a strike for "bread and peace" in response to
the death over 2 million Russian soldiers in war. This was 23
February on the Julian calendar then in use in Russia. This day on
the Gregorian calendar in use elsewhere was 8 March.
(www.internationalwomensday.com/about.asp#.VP5OouEYOok)

1917 Mar 8-1917 Mar 12,
Russia’s democratic February revolution took place. The "February
Revolution" (according to the Old Style calendar that Russians used
it was Feb 23-27) began with rioting and strikes in the Russian army
garrison at Petrograd.
(AP, 3/8/98)(LHC, 3/8/03)

1917 Mar 16, Nicholas II, Czar
of Russia, abdicated in favor of his brother Michael. He was forced
to sign a document of abdication after being brought down by
political unrest and widespread starvation stemming from Russia’s
staggering losses in WWI. The czar, his wife Alexandra, their four
daughters and son Alexis, heir to the throne, were held prisoner by
the Bolsheviks for several months at Tsarskoye Selo palace near
Petrograd. In August 1917, the family was transported to distant
Siberia to prevent any attempt to restore them to the throne. In
July 1918, the entire royal family was executed by local Bolsheviks.
(HNPD, 3/16/99)

1917 Mar 17, Czar Michael
abdicated after one day in favor of a provisional government under
Prince George Evgenievich Lvov (55).
(PCh, 1992, p.722)

1917 Mar 22, The U.S. became
the first to recognize the Kerensky Government in Russia.
(HN, 3/22/97)

1917 Mar, Revolutionary
soldiers dug up the Rasputin’s grave and soaked his body in gasoline
and set it ablaze in insure his death.
(WSJ, 3/25/96, p.A-15)

1917 Apr 3, Lenin left
Switzerland for Petrograd.
(MC, 4/3/02)

1917 Apr 16, Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin returned to Russia after years of exile to start the Bolshevik
Revolution.
(AP, 4/16/97)(HN, 4/16/98)

1917 Apr 20, In the Pravda
newspaper Lenin named Russia "Free land of world."
(MC, 4/20/02)

1917 May 1, Caucasian unity was
proclaimed at the first Mountain People's Congress in Vladikavkaz.
The idea of a Caucasus Confederation had its origins in the spring
of 1917 and was developed further in 1918. At the Congress the
"Alliance of United Mountain People of the North Caucasus and
Dagestan", headed by T. Chermoev, a Chechen, R. Kaplanov, a Kumyk,
P. Kotsev, a Kabardian, V. Dzhabagiev, an Ingush, and others, was
officially established. The Abkhazian people also became full
members of this alliance. A Mountain Peoples' Government was formed
in November 1917.
(www.ciaonet.org/olj/crs/crs_1998sp/crs98sp_las01.html)

1917 Oct 25(OS), In
Russia Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin seized power. Lenin
(1870-1924) and Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), seized power from Russian
socialist Alexander F. Kerensky (1881-1970) who had taken over the
government in July of 1917. Kerensky sent troop on this day to shut
down the Bolshevik press in Petrograd (Leningrad, St. Petersburg).
Kerensky’s ministers at the Winter Palace surrendered in the face of
Bolshevik armed might. [see Nov 7]
(www.marxists.org/history/ussr/revolution/)

1917 Nov 7, (October 25 old
style Julian calendar then used by Russia) The provisional
government of Premier Aleksandr Kerensky fell to the Bolsheviks led
by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He called his followers the Bolsheviks,
meaning the majority, when they formed for a short period the
majority of a revolutionary committee. The Bolsheviks became a
majority of the ruling group, but they were only a small part of the
total Russian population. Decades of czarist incompetence and the
devastation of World War I had wrecked the Russian economy and in
March 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated. Kerensky's provisional
government struggled to maintain power until Lenin's Bolshevik
followers stormed Petrograd and seized all government operations.
Lenin and his lieutenant, Leon Trotsky, quickly confiscated land and
nationalized industry and in March 1918, Russia withdrew from World
War I by signing the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with
Germany. Bloody civil war raged in Russia for the next two years as
the anti-Bolshevik White Army battled the Communists for control.
[see Nov 6] This day became a national holiday and continued until
it was abolished in late 2004.
(CFA, '96, p.58)(V.D.-H.K.p.260-261)(AP,
11/7/97)(HNPD, 11/7/98)(AP, 11/4/05)

1917 Dec 20, Russian secret
police in Czechoslovakia was formed under Felix Dzerzhinsky. He
helped lead the Bolshevik revolution and set up the communist secret
police, the Cheka, which later became the KGB.
(MC, 12/20/01)(WSJ, 10/15/02, p.D6)

1917 Dec 24, The Kaiser warned
Russia that he would use "iron fist" and "shining sword" if peace
was spurned.
(HN, 12/24/98)

1917 The Bolsheviks tried
banning money in favor of barter after the revolution, but chaos
resulted and they accepted money as a necessary evil.
(SFC, 2/11/98, p.B3)

1917 After the Bolshevik
revolution Lenin named Stalin commissar of nationalities.
(HNQ, 4/6/00)

1917 Feliks Dzherzhinsky
established the Cheka. It was transformed to the KGB in 1954.
(SFEC, 1/2/00, BR p.5)

1917 Chechens formed their 1st
independent state, the Confederation of North Caucasian Peoples,
following the Bolshevik Revolution. [see May 1]
(SSFC, 11/10/02, p.A11)

1917 The Don Cossacks declared
their own independent republic during the unrest that led to the
Bolshevik Revolution.
(SFC,10/28/97, p.A8)

1917-1991 This period was later covered by Martin
Malia in "The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia,
1917-1991."
(WSJ, 3/26/98, p.A20)

1918 Jan 19, The Latvian
rifleman 6th Tukums regiment, sent to defend the Bolshevik
headquarters in Smolny institute in St. Petersburg, took part in
disbanding Russia’s Constituent Assembly.
(http://tinyurl.com/krxwaky)

1918 Jan 31, Russia joined the
rest of the world and adopted the Gregorian calendar. The next day
became February 14, 1918.
(www.ortelius.de/kalender/greg_en.php)

1918 Feb 5, The Soviets
proclaimed the separation of church and state.
(HN, 2/5/99)

1918 Feb 16, The Council of
Lithuania declared the independence of the State of Lithuania. The
council also declared that the foundations of the state would be
determined by a Constituent Assembly to be elected by the
inhabitants on the basis of universal, equal and secret suffrage.
(DrEE, 10/5/96, p.5)(LHC, 2/16/03)

1918 Mar 3, Germany,
Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and Russia signed the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended Russian participation in World
War I. Germany and Austria forced Soviet Russia to sign the Peace of
Brest, which called for the establishment of 5 independent
countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine. The
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended Russian participation in World
War I, was annulled by the November 1918 armistice. The treaty
deprived the Soviets of White Russia.
(HN, 3/3/99)(LHC, 3/1/03)(AP, 3/3/08)

1918 Mar 20, The Bolsheviks
asked for American aid to rebuild their army.
(HN, 3/20/98)

1918 Apr 6, Savva Mamontov,
Russian industrialist, merchant, entrepreneur, and patron of the
arts, died. He had supervised the construction of the Severnaya
Railway linking Moscow with the Russian North. He was also involved
into the building of Donetsk railway from 1876 to 1882.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savva_Mamontov)

1918 Apr 13, The Soviet Wartime
and people’s commissariat issued an order to form Latvian Soviet
rifleman division. The commander in charge was Jukums Vacietis. It
was one of the first divisions in the Red Army.
(http://tinyurl.com/krxwaky)

1918 Jul 17, Russian Tsar,
Nicholas II, was executed at Ekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks under
orders from Lenin. His wife, son, 4 daughters, and 4 servants were
also executed. The family mass grave was discovered by a former KGB
agent in 1979 in the Urals and only 9 bodies were found. The bodies
were dug up in 1991. A 1997 documentary film by Victoria Lewis,
"Mystery of the Last Tsar," told the story. The Czar, his wife,
three children and four servants were executed by a 12-man firing
squad in the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. A reburial of the
family was scheduled in St. Petersburg for Jul 17, 1998.
(SFC, 4/5/97, p.E3)(SFC, 2/28/98, p.A8)(SFC,
7/15/98, p.A9)(AP, 7/17/07)
1918 Jul 17, Grand Duchess
Elizabeth Feodorovna (b.1864) was murdered at a mine the village of
Siniachikha. The Cheka beat Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich Romanov,
Princes Ioann Konstantinovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich, Igor
Konstantinovich, Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, Feodor Remez (Grand Duke
Sergei's secretary), and Varvara Yakovleva, a sister from the Grand
Duchess's convent, before throwing their victims into a pit,
Elizabeth being the first. Hand grenades were then hurled down the
shaft, but only one victim, Feodor Remez, died as a result of the
grenades. Finally a large quantity of brushwood was shoved into the
opening and set alight.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Elisabeth_of_Hesse_and_by_Rhine_%281864%E2%80%931918%29)

1918 Jul, The US War Dept.
assigned some 9,000 soldiers from California and the Philippines for
duty in Siberia.
(Ind, 5/4/02, 5A)

1918 Aug 2, A British force
landed in Archangel, Russia, to support White Russian opposition to
the Bolsheviks.
(HN, 8/2/98)

1918 Aug 15, Russia severed
diplomatic ties with US.
(MC, 8/15/02)

1918 Aug 16, US troops
overthrew Archangel (Russia).
(MC, 8/16/02)

1918 Aug 30, Lenin, the new
leader of Soviet Russia, was shot & wounded after a speech.
(MC, 8/30/01)

1918 Aug, Lenin gave a command
to suppress a peasant revolt in Penza with orders to hang no fewer
than one hundred known kulaks.
(WSJ, 10/23/96, p.A19)

1918 Sep 2, Some 9,000 soldiers
from California and the Philippines began arriving at Vladivostok
under Gen. William S. Graves. His orders said to stay out of
trouble. US President Woodrow Wilson sent the Polar Bear Expedition
to Russia in response to requests from the governments of Great
Britain and France to join the Allied Intervention in North Russia
(also known as the North Russia Campaign). The Allied intervention
in the Russian Civil War fought the Red Army in the surrounding
region during the period of September 1918 through to July 1919.
(Ind, 5/4/02,
5A)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Bear_Expedition)

1918 Sep 19, American troops of
the Allied North Russia Expeditionary Force received their baptism
of fire near the town of Seltso against Soviet forces.
(HN, 9/19/99)

1918 Sep 2, Some 9,000 soldiers
from California and the Philippines began arriving at Vladivostok
under Gen. William S. Graves. His orders said to stay out of
trouble.
(Ind, 5/4/02, 5A)

1918 Dec 11, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn (d.2008), Russian writer, was born. He won the 1970
Nobel Peace Prize and is famous for “One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich" (1962) and "The Gulag Archipelago" (1973). Daniel J.
Mahoney later authored "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent From
Ideology."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn)(WSJ, 10/11/01,
p.A20)

1918 Arthur Ransome
(1884-1967), British agent and writer, wrote a propaganda pamphlet
titled: “On Behalf of Russia: An Open Letter to America." In 2009
Roland Chambers authored “The Last Englishman: The Double Life of
Arthur Ransome."
(Econ, 8/29/09,
p.73)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Ransome)

1918 Lenin established the
Collegium on Affairs of Museums and Protection of Monuments of Art
and Antiquity.
(AM, Jul/Aug ‘97 p.33)

1918 Gustaf Mannerheim led a
Finnish victory over much larger Bolshevik and Finnish Red Guard
forces.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)
1918 Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural), a
1917 union of Finno-Ugric people in the middle of Russia, was
crushed by the Bolsheviks. Its foreign minister Sadri Maqsudi Arsal
was welcomed in Finland and then Estonia.
(Econ, 12/24/05, p.73)

1918 "Special departments,"
later known as the FSB, were established to spy on the military as
the Communist Party absorbed officers who had served under the
just-deposed czar.
(SFC, 2/17/00, p.D3)

1918 In Russia Jacob Ivanovich
Moiseeff of Minsk headed the Trans-Siberian Railway. His daughter
Nadya Jacobova Moiseeva was born in 1918 and escaped to Shanghai
after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
(SFC, 12/2/97, p.A22)

1918 Nikolay Bukharin, member
of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party and editor of
Pravda, led the "Left Communists" in opposition to V.I. Lenin’s
signing the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and withdrawing Russia
from World War I. Bukharin-a major Marxist theoretician and
economist-and the Left Communists proposed to transform the war into
a general European revolution.
(HNQ, 8/31/99)

1918 South Ossetians made a bid
to break away from Georgia and thousands fled in the ensuing
violence.
(WSJ, 8/27/08, p.A12)

1919 Jan 24, Grand Prince Pavel
Alexandrovich, a son of Czar Alexander II, and grand princes Nikolai
Mikhailovich, Georgy Mikhailovitch and Dmitry Konstantinovich,
nephews of the czar, were executed at the Peter and Paul Fortress in
St. Petersburg. They were posthumously rehabilitated in 1999 by the
Russian office of the prosecutor general.
(SFC, 6/10/99, p.C3)

1919 Feb 8, Lithuanian and
German military forces forced the Bolsheviks from Kedainiai.
(LHC, 2/8/03)

1919 Feb 27, The
Bolsheviks took Lithuania and joined it with White Russia as a
single Soviet republic. Litbel lasted until June 25.
(LHC, 2/27/03)

1919 Feb, The Polish–Soviet War
began and continued to March 1921. It was an armed conflict between
Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine against the Second Polish Republic
and the Ukrainian People's Republic, four states in post-World War I
Europe.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-Soviet_War)

1919 Mar 2, The 1st congress of
Communist Int’l. opened at the Kremlin.
(SC, 3/2/02)

1920 Feb 7, Adm. Alexander
Kolchak (b.1874), commander of the White Army in Siberia during the
civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, was executed
by a firing squad in Irkutsk about a month after relinquishing
command of anti-Bolshevik forces. He was condemned in Soviet law as
a counterrevolutionary. In 2004 efforts began to exonerate him.
(AP,
12/7/04)(www.firstworldwar.com/bio/kolchak.htm)

1920 Feb 9, The Svalbard Treaty
gave Norway sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, but
allowed other countries to establish settlements there and to
exploit its natural resources. The treaty allowed Russia to pursue
mining at Spitsbergen. By 2017 there were more than 40 countries
party to the treaty.
{Norway, Russia}
(WSJ, 9/19/97, p.A1)(Econ, 10/11/08, p.70)(Econ,
10/2/04, p.52)(Reuters,
10/26/17)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard)

1920 Mar 7, The Bolsheviks
opened major offensive on the Polish front.
(HN, 3/7/98)

1920 Apr 5, Japanese forces
landed in Vladivostok.
(HN, 5/5/97)

1920 Apr 28, Azerbaijan joined
the USSR. The Red Army invaded Azerbaijan and turned the country
into a Soviet Republic.
(HN, 4/28/98)(CO, Grolier’s Amer. Acad. Enc./
Azerbaijan)

1920 Jul 8, The Galician Soviet
Socialist Republic (Galician SSR) was formed and lasted to September
21, 1920, during the Polish-Soviet War within the area of the
South-Western front of the Red Army.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_Soviet_Socialist_Republic)

1920 Oct 14, In the Dorpart
Treaty the Soviet Bolsheviks reaffirmed Finnish independence, gave
Finland the ice-free port of Pechenga towards the Arctic Ocean and
put the Finnish border 18 miles west of Leningrad. The treaty,
signed by Stalin, was precipitated by Gustaf Mannerheim’s victory
over much larger Bolshevik and Finnish Red Guard forces in 1918.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)

1920 Nov, White Russian Major
Gen’. Paul Petroff entrusted 20 boxes of gold coins and 2 boxes of
gold bullion to Colonel R. Isome of the Japanese forces that
occupied part of Siberia in order to cross Manchuria and not loose
the money to bandits. He was fleeing to the anti-Bolshevik
stronghold at Vladivostok. The money was never returned. The events
were later documented by his son Serge Petroff in the 1997 book "Let
the War Rage."
(SFC,10/17/97, p.D2)
1920 Nov, Chechens joined with
other Caucasian peoples to form the Republic of the Mountain
Peoples. Chechens had rebelled during the civil war that followed
the Russian Revolution of 1917, clashing with local Cossacks and the
anti-Communist White forces as well as with the Communists' Red
Army. With the establishment of Soviet authority in the region.
(www.chechnyawar.com/history)

1920 Isaac Babel (d.1940) wrote
a wartime diary as he rode horseback with Budyonny’s First Cavalry
Army as the Cossacks participated in the Bolshevik invasion of
Poland. An essay on the diary was written by Cynthia Ozick in her
1996 book: "Fame & Folly."
(WSJ, 5/22/96, p.A-18)
1920 Leon Theremin (d.1993)
invented the theremin musical instrument. He was a Russian physicist
who invented the instrument made of vacuum tubes and oscillators. In
1927 he was allowed to go to the US to promote his instrument and to
spy for the Soviets. He returned to Russia in late 1938. [He was
later abducted by operators of Stalin and taken back to Moscow where
he is forced to work on devices for the Soviet Ministry of Internal
Affairs.] He was sent to Siberia for a year and then back to Moscow
to work on aircraft design. He later designed some listening
devices. [see 1945] The theremin was an early electronic instrument
with an eerie, sliding tone. The 1994 film "Theremin: An Electronic
Odyssey," featured the instrument. Clara Rockmore (d.1998 at 88),
born Clara Reisenberg in Vilnius, became a theremin virtuoso, and
was the focus of the 1998 video documentary: "Clara Rockmore, The
Greatest Theremin Virtuoso."
(WSJ, 9/19/95, p.A20)(SFC, 5/12/98, p.A21)(ON,
11/01, p.8)
1920 Russia became the first
country to allow abortion.
(Econ, 5/19/07, p.66)
1920 During the Russian Civil
War, Mongolia was invaded by a White Russian force of 5,000 men.
Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg hoped to use
Mongolia as a base to restore the Romanov regime. During his 130-day
rule he ordered that Commissars, Communists, and Jews, together with
their families, be exterminated. In 2009 James Palmer authored “The
Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman
Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia."
(www.gobiexpeditions.com)(Econ, 2/14/09, p.96)
1920 During Polish-Soviet war
thousands of captured Red Army men were placed in the camp of
Тuchola, Poland. These POWs lived in trenches, while famine, cold,
and infectious diseases killed tens of prisoners daily. In the
winter 1920/1921 POWs had a death rate of about 25%, which was
attributed to malnutrition, poor sanitary conditions, lack of fuel
and medicines, and physical maltreatment by the Polish supervisors.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuchola)

1920s Dziga Vertov created a cinematic mosaic of
Moscow in his film "The Man With a Movie Camera."
(SFEC, 2/2/97, DB. p.8)

1920s The New Economic Policy (NEP) of Lenin
was elaborated by Nikolai Bukharin.
(WSJ, 3/26/98, p.A20)

1921 Aleksandr Rodchenko,
artist, created his whimsical "Project for a Perpetual Motion
Machine." He also painted his “Triptych" in this year.
(WSJ, 7/8/98, p.A13)(WSJ, 10/5/05, p.D14)

1921 Yevgeny Zamyatin (d.1937),
Russian author, completed his novel “We." It offended communist
censors and did not appear in print in Russia until 1988. Editions
outside Russia became available in 1924. In 2006 Natasha Randall
made a new English translation.
(WSJ, 7/26/06, p.D11)

1921 Afghanistan signed a
Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union.
(WSJ, 9/20/01, p.A12)

1921 The borders of Armenia
were gerrymandered when the Caucasus territories were made part of
the Soviet Union. This made the area of Nagorno-Karabakh, a
mountainous enclave of mostly Armenians surrounded by Azerbaijan
dependent on Moscow. The site of Ani, former capital of Armenia, was
ceded to Turkey.
(SFC, 2/4/98, p.C2)(WSJ, 3/18/98, p.A18)(Econ,
6/17/06, p.59)

1921 The Red Army forced
the Chechen government into exile and took nominal control. Armed
resistance continued. The "Mountain Peoples' Government" was forced
to emigrate as Soviet power became established in the Caucasus.
(SSFC, 11/10/02,
p.A11)(www.ciaonet.org/olj/crs/crs_1998sp/crs98sp_las01.html)

1921 The League of Nations
granted the Aland Island group to the new Finnish Republic.
(WSJ, 12/5/97, p.A1)

1921 In Mongolia Damdiny
Sukhbaatar, supported by the Bolshevik administration in Moscow,
organized a force that, with the help of Red Army troops, defeated
the White Russians and drove off the Chinese.
(www.gobiexpeditions.com)

1921 In Russia a mineral
exploration mission discovered coal deposits Vorkuta, 1,200 miles
northeast of Moscow. The 1st coal mine there opened in 1931 using
prisoner labor. Use of prisoners for mining ended in 1962.
(ST, 7/29/04, p.A3)

1921 A Soviet famine began with
a drought that caused massive crop failures, including total crop
failure on about 20% of Soviet farmland. a Soviet estimate put the
death toll at 5.1 million.
(www.overpopulation.com/faq/Health/hunger/famine/soviet_famine.html)

1922 Feb 1, Lieutenant Colonel
I. Matuszewski, the head of the II department of the Polish Joint
Staff, informed the military minister of Poland in the letter, that
22,000 prisoners of war were lost in the camp of Tuchola during its
existence.
(www.search.com/reference/Prisoner-of-war_camp)

1922 Apr 3, Stalin was
appointed General Secretary of Communist Party.
(MC, 4/3/02)

1922 Apr 16, A German-Russia
treaty was signed in Italy. It recognized the Soviet Union.
(MC, 4/16/02)

1922 The Constructivist group
of artists in Russia issued a manifesto calling for the defeat of
art, which they regarded as the enemy of technology. Alexander
Rodchenko (1891-1956), a painter turned photographer, was founding
member of the group.
(Econ, 2/9/08,
p.91)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandr_Rodchenko)

1922 The Red October Heat and
Power Plant opened in St. Petersburg, Russia.
(SSFC, 12/22/02, p.F8)

1922 The Soviet government
divided the North Caucasus along ethnic lines, separating the
Chechen Autonomous Oblast from the Republic of the Mountain Peoples
and abolishing the republic itself in 1924.
(www.chechnyawar.com/history)(USAT, 9/2/04,
p.13A)

1922 Lenin deported 70 of the
best minds in Russia along with their families. In 2006 Lesley
Chamberlain authored “The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of
the Intelligentsia."
(Econ, 3/18/06, p.80)

1922 South Ossetia became an
autonomous region within the Soviet Republic of Georgia.
(WSJ, 8/27/08, p.A12)

1923 Tamara Geva (d.1991),
Russian ballet dancer, married George Balanchine, ballet
choreographer. The couple traveled to East Prussia in 1924 with the
Soviet State Dancers and then defected to Paris where they joined
Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes.
(SFC,12/13/97, p.A23)(Econ, 4/12/08, p.94)

1924 Jan 21, Russian
revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died at age 53 and a major
struggle for power in the Soviet Union began. A triumvirate led by
Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin. By 1928, Stalin had assumed absolute
power, ruling as an often brutal dictator until his death in 1953 of
a brain hemorrhage. In 1998 Vladimir Brovkin published "Russia After
Lenin." After the death of Lenin, Bukharin became a full member of
the Politburo and opposed the policy of initiating rapid
industrialization and collectivization in agriculture-a position
shared by Stalin at the time. In 2000 Robert Service authored
"Lenin."
(TMC, 1994, p.1924)(AP, 1/21/98)(WSJ, 8/3/98,
p.A12)(HNQ, 8/31/99)

1924 Jan 24, The Russian city
of St. Petersburg was renamed Leningrad in honor of the late
revolutionary leader. It has since been re-named St. Petersburg.
(AP, 1/24/99)

1924 Jan 27, Lenin's body was
laid in a marble tomb on Red Square near the Kremlin.
(HN, 1/27/99)

1924 May 12, Russian-American
poet Alexander Esenin-Volpin was born in Leningrad. A notable
dissident, political prisoner and a leader of the Soviet human
rights movement, he spent total of fourteen years incarcerated and
repressed by the Soviet authorities in prisons, psikhushkas and
exile.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Esenin-Volpin)

1924 The Bolsheviks formed the
Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), aka
Transdniestria, as a basis for later taking over a chunk of Romania.
(WSJ, 7/8/97, p.A1,8)(http://tinyurl.com/b7m4b)

1924 After the death of Lenin
Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo and opposed the
policy of initiating rapid industrialization and collectivization in
agriculture-a position shared by Stalin at the time. When, in 1928,
Stalin reversed his view, Bukharin's power diminished. Although he
participated in writing the 1936 Soviet constitution, he was
ultimately expelled from the Communist Party in 1937 for being a
Trotskyite, was falsely accused and found guilty of
counterrevolutionary activities and espionage. Bukharin was executed
in 1938.
(HNQ, 8/31/99)

1925 Jan 16, Leon Trotsky was
dismissed as CEO of Russian Revolution Military Council. Stalin took
power over Trotsky.
(TMC, 1994, p.1925)(MC, 1/16/02)

1925 Sergei Prokofiev composed
his opera "The Gambler."
(WSJ, 4/16/01, p.A14)
1925 “The White Guard," a novel
by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) of Kiev during the Russian civil
war, first appeared in part in serial form. A stage version titled
“The Days of the Turbins" ran from 1926-1941. The novel was not
reprinted in Russia until 1966.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Guard)(Econ, 8/9/14, p.67)
1925 Fragments of Ivan Bunin’s
“Cursed Days," compiled of diaries and notes he made while in Moscow
and Odessa in 1918-1920, were first published by the Paris-based
Vozrozhdenye newspaper. A full version appeared in 1936. It was
banned in the USSR until the 1980s. Bunin (1870-1953) was the first
Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursed_Days)
1925 Eisenstein made his
classic silent film "Potemkin."
(SFC, 1/4/97, p.E1)

1927 Dec, Leonid Kulik
(d.1942), Russian expert on meteorites, delivered his report to the
Russian Academy of Sciences on his 2nd trip to the Tunguska site in
Siberia regarding the 1908 meteorite explosion. He estimated that
the meteorite had weighed several thousand metric tons and convinced
the academy to sponsor another expedition in 1928.
(ON, 6/08, p.8)

1927 Josef Stalin purged much
of the Tatar intelligentsia in the Crimea.
(SFC, 1/4/99, p.A8)
1927 Sergius, a Greek Orthodox
bishop, signed an agreement accepting the Soviet Union as a “civil
motherland."
(Econ, 10/18/08, p.69)
1927 The monastery of Saint
Serafim Sarofsky in the village of Deveyevo, Russia, was liquidated.
The 266 year old complex was used to store lumber and vegetables
until 1991 when it was returned to the church.
(SFC, 5/18/96, p.A-11)
1927 Prince John Kropotkin, son
of Russian Prince Alexei Kropotkin, was beaten to death on a Paris
street. Soviet agents were suspected.
(SFC, 7/5/04, p.B4)

1928 Jan 11, Leon Trotsky, a
leader of the Bolshevik revolution and early architect of the Soviet
state, was shipped out by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to Alma-Ata in
remote Soviet Central Asia. Later he was banished from the USSR.
(MC, 1/11/02)

1928 May 24, The dirigible
Italia crashed while attempting to reach Spitzbergen. Nine men
survived the initial crash. In 2000 Wilbur Cross authored "Disaster
at the Pole," a revised edition of the 1960 version of the disaster
led by Italian aviator Umberto Nobile. The Russian film "Krasnaya
palatka" (1969), starring Sean Connery, detailed the Nobile
expedition and attempted rescue. This movie was released in North
America under the title "The Red Tent."
(ON, 10/00, p.6)(SSFC, 1/7/01, Par
p.14)(www.imdb.com/title/tt0067315/)

1928 Jun 3, An amateur radio
operator in Archangel, Russian, picked up a distress signal from the
crew of the Italia and reported the crew’s location. A 2nd report
from an American amateur changed the location and proved to be a
hoax.
(ON, 10/00, p.6)

1928 Stalin began his plans for
the resettlement of Jews to Birobidzhan, an area of land the size of
Belgium on the Russian-Chinese border. It was officially declared
the Jewish Autonomous Region and by 1930 some 230,000 people lived
in colonies there. Yiddish language and culture was fostered but
worship was forbidden.
(SFEM, 5/24/98, p.4)

1928 Stalin reversed his view
on rapid industrialization and Bukharin's power diminished. Although
Bukharin participated in writing the 1936 Soviet constitution, he
was ultimately expelled from the Communist Party in 1937 for being a
Trotskyite, was falsely accused and found guilty of
counterrevolutionary activities and espionage. Bukharin was executed
in 1938.
(HNQ, 8/31/99)

1928 In the USSR a show trial
of the North Caucasus Shakhty engineers paved the way for Stalin’s
consolidation of power in 1929. They were accused of sabotaging coal
production in Shakhty on orders from the Germans. The trial
initiated a period of terror against technicians and engineers. The
trial resulted in five of the 53 accused engineers being sentenced
to death and another 44 sent to prison.
(Econ, 4/4/09,
p.53)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakhty_Trial)

1928 Bertram and Ella Goldberg
Wolfe, activists in the Comintern, went to Moscow as guests of the
Communist Party. The Comintern was Communism's international
governing body. Bertram clashed with Stalin over the idea of
"American Exceptionalism," where the US model could be different
from the Marxist-Leninist model. The Wolfe's were put under house
arrest for 6 months until the intervention of Dr. Julius Hammer.
(SFC, 1/17/00, p.C2)

1928 Maria Feodorovna (b.1847),
the daughter of Denmark's King Christian IX and Queen Louise, died
in Denmark. Princess Dagmar had married Russia’s Czar Alexander II
and their six children included Nicholas II, who became czar in
1894. She fled St. Petersburg in 1917. Her casket rested alongside
Danish kings and queens until 2006 when it was sent to Russia.
(AP, 9/23/06)

1929 Sep 21, Fighting between
China and the Soviet Union broke out along the Manchurian border.
(HN, 9/21/98)

1929 Nov 18, Stalin sent troops
to Manchuria.
(MC, 11/18/01)

1929 Dec 22, Soviet troops left
Manchuria after a truce was reached with the Chinese over the
Eastern Railway dispute.
(HN, 12/22/98)

1929 Marc Chagall (1887-1985)
painted "The Rooster."
(SFC, 7/26/03, p.D1)
1929 The film "Arsenal" was
based on a 1918 incident where the Bolsheviks battled national
troops in Kiev.
(SFC, 6/4/99, p.C12)
1929 Joseph Stalin reset the
Soviet calendar to give workers every 5th day off. Shifts were
staggered so that factories could run without interruption. The
staggered working week was abandoned after 3 years.
(Econ, 5/21/05, p.80)
1929 Stalin began the
liquidation of the kulaks, i.e. independent farmers.
(V.D.-H.K.p.305)
1929 In Russia the Gorky
Automobile Plant (GAZ) in Nizhny Novgorod was founded. Henry Ford
was asked to help set up the Soviet car plant.
(Econ, 7/14/12, p.55)

1929 Tajikistan was created by
Stalin to divide and rule the ethnic Muslim peoples of Central Asia.
(WSJ, 7/2/98, p.A1)

1929-1932 For some revisionists Stalin’s brutal
5-year plan had its roots in a worker "cultural revolution" against
the NEP.
(WSJ, 3/26/98, p.A20)

1929-1953 Some 18 million people were sent to the
Gulag, the vast Soviet prison system that included labor and
concentration camps. In 2003 Ann Applebaum authored "Gulag: A
History."
(SSFC, 4/27/03, M3)(NW, 4/28/03, p.13)

1930 The Soviet Union began
deporting land holders, known as kulaks, along with their families
as part of the rural collectivization process. The kulaks made up
about a fifth of the Russian peasant class, which consisted of some
25 million households. In 2007 Lynne Viola authored “The Unknown
Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements."
(WSJ, 4/26/07, p.D7)
1930 American industrialist
Charles R. Crane bought 18 brass bells from the Soviet government,
saving them from being melted down in Josef Stalin's purges that saw
thousands of monks executed and churches and monasteries destroyed
or turned into prisons, orphanages or animal barns. They hung for
decades in the towers at Lowell House and Harvard Business School's
Baker Library. In 2007 Harvard returned the largest of the bells,
the Everyday Bell, to the Danilovsky Monastery and planned to return
the rest in 2008.
(AP, 9/12/07)

1930s Mikhail Bulgakov
(1891-1940) wrote his novel "The Master and Margarita." It satirized
life under Stalin and was not published until 1966.
(SFEC, 6/25/00, BR p.1)

1930s The centralized gas
heating system of the city of Moscow was constructed.
(SFC, 3/27/97, p.C4)
1930s The labor camp in
Norilsk, Siberia, was built. It was later developed as a huge nickel
complex.
(SFC, 7/29/97, p.A10)

1930-1960 Millions of people including ethnic
Germans and Russian dissidents died during this period, unable to
survive starvation and torture in a network of gulag camps scattered
from Russia's Arctic tundra to the inhospitable Kazakh steppe.
(Reuters, 12/21/09)

1931 Feb 1, Boris Yeltsin
(d.2007), prime minister of Russia (1991-1992) and the first
president of the Republic of Russia (1991-1999), was born in the
Ural Mts. of the USSR.
(SFC, 1/23/96,
p.A8)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin)(Econ, 4/28/07,
p.98)

1931 Mar 2, Mikhail Gorbachev,
Soviet Secretary-General (1985-91), was born. He was responsible for
restructuring the Soviet economy (perestroika) and openness and
information (glasnost). Mikhail Gorbachev rose through the ranks of
the Communist Party as an expert in agricultural affairs. Born to a
peasant family, Gorbachev worked on a farm as a combine operator
before going to Moscow State University in 1950. He joined the party
in 1952 and, upon graduation with a law degree in 1955, he became a
full-time party official. In 1967 he graduated from the Stavropol
Agricultural Institute and was named to the party’s Central
Committee in 1971. He was promoted to the party Secretariat in 1978,
earning a reputation as an innovator as party secretary of
agriculture.
(HN, 3/2/99)(HNQ, 6/17/99)(WSJ, 12/1/07, p.A8)

1931 Jun 24, The Soviet Union
and Afghanistan signed a treaty of neutrality.
(HN, 6/24/98)

1931 Stalin ordered that
Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral be blown up. It was rebuilt
after the fall of the USSR and dedicated in 2000.
(WSJ, 8/2100, p.A1)
1931 USSR leader Joseph Stalin
turned Abkhazia into an autonomous region of Georgia. Beria, his
secret police chief, later resettled Georgians from the western part
of the country in Abkhazia.
(Econ, 7/5/08, p.64)
1931 The US Dept. of Commerce
issued a pamphlet titled “Employment for Americans in Soviet
Russia." In the early 1930s hundreds of American immigrated to the
Soviet Union in search of jobs and a new life. Many ended up in mass
graves. In 2008 Tim Tzouliadis authored “The Forsaken: An American
Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia."
(Econ, 8/9/08, p.80)(SFC, 9/1/08, p.E3)

1932 May 2, Walter Duranty of
the NY Times won a Pulitzer Prize for his series on the Soviet Union
that contained uncritical praise of Joseph Stalin. In 2003 a
historian argued, without success, that the prize should be revoked
due to Duranty's deliberate failure to cover the forced famine in
the Ukraine that killed millions of people. In 2004 David C.
Engerman authored "Modernization from the Other Shore," an American
view of the Soviet experience."
(SFC, 10/23/03, p.A3)(SFC, 11/22/03, p.A3)(WSJ,
2/24/04, p.D8)

1932 Dec 30, The USSR barred
food handouts for housewives under 36 years of age. They would now
have to work to eat.
(HN, 12/30/98)

1932 The Gorky Automobile Works
(GAZ) was founded in Nizhny Novgorod.
(USAT, 10/9/98, p.12A)

1932 Sep 3, In Soviet Russia
Pavel Morozov (13) was allegedly killed by his relatives in
Gerasimovka for having reporting his father to the state
authorities. In 2005 Catriona Kelly authored “Comrade Pavlik: The
Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero."
(Econ, 6/4/05,
p.80)(http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/Pavlik_Morozov)

1932-1933 Stalin imposed terror and famine on the
Ukraine, Kuban and Kazakhstan that was carried out be Lazar
Kaganovich. Millions died in the famine. Stalin provoked what the
Ukrainians called the Great Famine as part of his campaign to force
Ukrainian peasants to give up their land and join collective farms.
During the height of the famine, which was enforced by methodical
confiscation of all food by the Soviet secret police, cannibalism
was widespread.
(WSJ, 2/14/96, p.A-15)(SFC, 4/3/97, p.C2)(AP,
11/26/05)

1933 Mar 29, The front page of
the New York Evening Post said "Famine Grips Russia — Millions
Dying." The report was by Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who had
recently sneaked into Ukraine, at the height of a famine engineered
by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Jones was killed by bandits in 1935
while covering Japan's expansion into China. In 2009 the diaries of
Jones were put on display for the first time in London.
(AP, 11/13/09)

1933 Nov 16, The United States
and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations. President
Roosevelt sent a telegram to Soviet leader Maxim Litvinov,
expressing hope that U.S.-Soviet relations would "forever remain
normal and friendly."
(AP, 11/1697)

1934 Feb, The Chelyuskin, which
set off in July 1933 from the port of Murmansk, Russia, for
Vladivostok in the Pacific Ocean, got stranded among ice fields in
the Bering Sea and sank off the coast of Chukotka. The trip of more
than 4,500 miles was meant to demonstrate the Soviet government's
assertion that cargo ships could safely take the northern route.
Soviet aviators launched over two dozen flights to search for the
survivors, and in early March finally evacuated about 10 women and 2
babies born during the sea voyage. Airmen brought out the rest of
the passengers and crew men the following month. In 2006 Russian
divers found the ship.
(AP, 9/22/06)

1934 Sep 18, The League of
Nations admitted the Soviet Union. Joseph Avenol, secretary-general
of the League of Nations, sold out the organization he had sworn to
uphold.
(WUD, 1994, p.424,1682)(HN, 9/18/98)

1934 Dec 1, Sergei M. Kirov, a
collaborator of Josef Stalin, was assassinated in Leningrad, a
stronghold of opposition to Stalin. This resulted in a massive
purge. Kirov was succeeded by Andrei Zdhanov, who became the virtual
dictator of literary and artistic policies of the USSR.
(AP, 12/1/98)(SFC, 6/10/00, p.A12)

1934 William Henry Chamberlin,
a journalist, published "Russia's Iron Age," which chronicled the
depredations of Stalin.
(WSJ, 4/13/99, p.A16)

1934 The documentary film "Eyes
on Russia, from the Caucasus to Moscow" was produced.
(SFC, 11/21/96, p.E2)

1934 There were 1,966 delegates
to the 17th Soviet Party Congress. By the 1999 Congress 1,108
delegates were arrested and many shot as traitors. In 1999 J. Arch
Getty and Oleg V. Naumov co-wrote "The Road To Terror," an
examination of the Stalin purges that was a follow-up to Getty's
1985 work "Origins of the Great Purges." The standard account on the
purges is "The Great Terror" (1968) by Robert Conquest.
(WSJ, 9/27/99, p.A32)(Econ, 12/3/05, p.79)

1934 The Soviet Union’s secret
police organization-the People’s Commissariat for Internal
Affairs-was better known as the NKVD. The NKVD replaced the State
Political Administration, or GPU. The GPU had formerly been known as
the Cheka. During World War II there were several reorganizations of
the NKVD, out of which grew the MGB, or Ministry of State Security.
The MGB evolved into the KGB in 1954.
(HNPD, 6/24/99)

1935 Mar 30, Britain and Russia
agreed on treaties intended to curb the power of the Reich.
(HN, 3/30/98)

1935 Apr 28, The Moscow 81-km
underground opened.
(MC, 4/28/02)

1935 May 15, Kasimir Malevich
(b.1878), Ukraine-born Cubist painter, died. He was a leader of the
Suprematist movement in Russian painting. He pioneered the use of
abstract geometrical elements and limited colors to demonstrate the
supremacy of expressing feelings.
(WSJ, 6/21/99,
p.B14)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir_Malevich)

1935 Sep 19, Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky (b.1857), Russian scientist, died. He was a visionary
and pioneer of astronautics. He theorized many aspects of human
space travel and rocket propulsion decades before others, and played
an important role in the development of the Soviet and Russian space
programs. In 1932 Tsiolkovsky wrote "The Cosmic Philosophy," a
summary of his philosophical ideas. He also wrote science fiction
books, including "On The Moon" (1895), “Dreams of the Earth and Sky"
(1895), and “Beyond the Earth" (1920).
(www.informatics.org/museum/tsiol.html)

1935 Hotel Moskva, designed by
architect Alexei Shchusev, opened just off Red Square. It was later
featured on the Stolichnaya Vodka label.
(AP, 7/22/03)

1935 In the Soviet Union the
Stakhanovite campaign began in 1935 using the example of coal miner
Aleksey Grigoriyevich Stakhanov who, by allegedly mining 102 tons of
coal in one shift, exceeded and established new production norms.
Someone known as a Stakhanovite was a member of the Soviet workers'
elite by virtue of exceeding production norms and was rewarded with
special privileges. Used in a great propaganda campaign from 1935 to
the start of World War II, the higher production norms placed great
pressure on other workers and often resulted in quality of goods
sacrificed for quantity.
(HNQ, 10/3/98)

1936 Aug 19, A trial against
Ljev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, for alleged "Trotskyism," opened
in Moscow.
(MC, 8/19/02)

1936 Nov-1936 Dec, In Spain
hundreds of Franco supporters were killed at Paracuellos. Between
2,000 and 4,000 suspected supporters of the coup against the Second
Spanish Republic, were killed by the Republican Army. The Soviet
NKVD was later implicated.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracuellos_massacre)(Econ, 3/24/12,
p.86)

1936 Dec 5, The New
Constitution in the Soviet Union promised universal suffrage, but
the Communist Party remained the only legal political party.
(HN, 12/5/98)

1936 Sergei Rachmaninoff
composed his Third Symphony.
(WSJ, 1/14/02, p.A16)
1936 The USSR began using
Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea to test deadly germs. In 1988
anthrax from Sverdlovsk was shipped in and buried there.
(SFC, 3/24/03, p.A5)
1936 Stalin imposed a ban on
abortion in the USSR.
(SSFC, 8/24/03, p.A11)
1936 A delegation from Los
Angeles went to Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia,
to present a souvenir pamphlet, the fate of the delegation was
unknown.
(SFEC, 5/31/98, p.7)
1936 Some 700 Soviet advisors
were sent to Spain in an attempt to run and control the economy,
government and armed forces. By the end of the civil war most were
killed by Stalin’s purges.
(WSJ, 7/11/01, p.A15)

1936-1939 The Spanish Civil War has been commonly
referred to as "a rehearsal for World War II" by historians because
of the intervention by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet
Union, and their use of the war to test new weapons and military
techniques. It was fought between the liberal Second Spanish
Republic government and right-wing rebel forces, including the
fascist Falangists, monarchists and Nationalists. The rebels had the
support of the Roman Catholic Church, in addition to Germany and
Italy. The Government supporters, called Loyalists, had the support
of communists, socialists, anarchists, the Soviet Union and
volunteers from around the world who formed the International
Brigades. Between 400,000 and 1 million were killed in the war,
ultimately won by the rebels. In 2008 Paul Preston authored “We Saw
Spain Die: Foreign correspondents in the Spanish Civil War." In 2012
Paul Preston authored “The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and
Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain."
(HNQ, 9//00)(Econ, 10/18/08, p.97)(Econ, 3/24/12,
p.86)

1937 Jan 19, In the Soviet
Union, the People's Commissars Council was formed under Molotov.
(HN, 1/19/99)

1937 Mar 6, Valentina
Nikolayeva-Tereshkova, Russian astronaut, was born. She became the
first women to orbit the Earth in 1963.
(HN, 3/6/99)

1937 Jun 6, Ivan Papanin
(1894-1986) raised the Soviet flag over the North Pole-1 station.
For 234 days the 4-man Papanin team carried out a wide range of
scientific observations in the near-polar zone.
(Econ, 8/11/07,
p.43)(www.mvk.ru/eng/about/press/publications/publication_105.shtm)

1937 Jun 20, Immediately upon
their landing in Vancouver, [Wa.?] after their daring 1937
transpolar flight from Moscow to America, three Soviet airmen were
treated to breakfast in the home of Brigadier General George C.
Marshall, commander of Vancouver Barracks. The record-setting,
5,507-mile, 60-hour flight made the unexpected early-morning landing
on June 20 in Vancouver as the Tupelov ANT-25 ran low on fuel.
Marshall, alerted to the landing, rushed to Pearson Field and
escorted the crew of Valery Chkalov, Georgy Baidukov and Aleksandr
Belyakov back to his home where his wife prepared a hearty breakfast
for them. The Soviets were feted in the U.S. for their
accomplishment and each honored as Heroes of the Soviet Union.
(HNQ, 10/12/98)

1937 Oct-Nov, A 3-man panel,
the "Osobaya Troika," signed death sentences that were sent to
thousands of gulags across Russia and led to the massacre of 9,000
victims in the Karelia Forest at Medvezhyegorsk. The grave site was
opened in Jul, 1997, and a monument was planned.
(SFC, 7/17/97, p.A10)

1937 Stalin ordered a major
overhaul of Uzbek leadership and heads began to roll. The artist
Alexander Rodchenko, who had designed the album "Ten Years of
Uzbekistan," blotted out the photos of purged Uzbek leaders in his
personal copy. It provided grist for the 1997 book by David King
"The Commissar Vanishes," that describes how Stalin manipulated
images for his benefit.
(WSJ, 10/29/97, p.A20)
1937 Stalin deported some
180,000 Soviet Koreans from their homes and farms and sent them by
cattle car to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
(LSA, Fall/06, p.28)
1937 The USSR census of this
year reported a decline in the population to 162 million and Stalin
had the officials responsible for the count shot. He had told
officials a year earlier that the count would be 170 million, which
ignored those who died in famines and purges.
(WSJ, 12/1/99, p.A24)(Econ, 12/22/07, p.99)

1937-1938 There were sweeping purges across the
Soviet Union. 14 million people across Russia were estimated to have
died in the purges. At least 30,000 people were executed in Moscow.
Several hundred Americans were arrested in Karelia, near the Finnish
border. Several thousand Americans and Canadians had moved there to
help develop the Soviet timber industry. 40,000 people a month were
executed.
(SFEC, 12/22/96, BR p.7)(SFC, 7/17/97,
p.A10)(SFEC, 11/9/97, p.A12)(SFC, 4/17/99, p.B3)(Econ, 11/5/16,
p.43)

1938 Jan 1, Alexander Gelver,
24, an American from Oshkosh, Wis., was executed in a Stalinist
purge.
(SFEC,11/9/97, p.A26)

1938 Mar, Nikolay Bukharin, a
revolutionary economist who helped edit Pravda with Lenin, was put
on trial and executed in the purges. He met Lenin in 1912 while in
exile in Western Europe, but returned to Russia with the February
revolution of 1917. Bukharin broke with Lenin over Lenin‘s support
of peace with Germany, but championed Lenin‘s New Economic Policy
after his death in 1924. It was partially this adherence that
brought Bukharin into conflict with the Stalinist faction within the
Politburo, losing his position in 1929. In early 1937, after years
of declining influence, Bukharin was secretly arrested and later
tried on false charges for "counterrevolutionary activities."
(HNQ, 12/12/00)

1938 Dec 27, Osip Mandelstam
(b.1891), Russian poet born in Poland to Jewish parents, died while
in transit to a labor camp. In 1998 Emma Gerstein authored “Moscow
Memoirs: Memories of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Literary
Russia Under Stalin." An English translation by John Crowfoot became
available in 2004.
(SSFC, 9/11/04,
p.M3)(www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk)

1938 Lev Razgon (d.1999 at 92)
was sent to labor camp on charges of anti-state activities. He spent
17 years in labor camps and later published "Not A Thought-Up Story"
about his experiences.
(SFC, 9/9/99, p.A21)

1939 Mar 22, Germany marched
into Klaipeda (Memel), Lithuania. The Lithuanian warship Prezidentas
Smetona was left without a harbor. The ship soon settled at Latvia’s
port of Liepaja. In December Ltn. P. Labanauskas was named captain.
In 1940 Soviet occupiers called for the ship to raise the Soviet
flag, but Captain Labanauskas sailed the ship out of Soviet
territory. The ship was later handed over to the Soviet Baltic
fleet. On Jan 11, 1945, it hit a mine and sank off the coast of
Finland.
(Voruta #27-28, Jul 1996,
p.2)(http://tinyurl.com/cs545k)

1939 Aug 19, Vyacheslav Molotov
outlined the Soviet requirements to the German Ambassador, Friedrich
von Schulenburg. He insisted that trade agreements be signed and
that a special protocol be made defining the German and Soviet
spheres of interest.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)

1939 Aug 23, German Foreign
Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Commissar for Foreign
Affairs Vyacheslav M. Molotov signed a Treaty of Non-Aggression, the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact freeing Hitler to invade Poland and Stalin
to invade Finland. Secret protocols, made public years later, were
added that assigned Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia to be
within the Soviet sphere of influence. Poland was partitioned along
the rivers Narev, Vistula and San. Germany retained Lithuania
enlarged by the inclusion of Vilnius. Just days after the signing,
Germany invaded Poland, and by the end of September, both powers had
claimed sections of Poland. World War II and Hitler's invasion of
the Soviet Union were just around the corner.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A16)(DrEE, 9/28/96, p.3)(DrEE,
10/26/96, p.4)(AP, 8/23/97)(HNPD, 8/22/98)(HN, 8/23/98)

1939 Sep 17, The Soviet Union
attacked Poland, more than two weeks after Nazi Germany launched its
assault. They took 217,000 Poles prisoner and occupied eastern
Poland within a week with losses of 737 dead and 2,000 wounded. The
Polish submarine Orzel escaped from internment and went on to fight
the Germans against long odds.
(AP, 9/17/97)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(HN,
9/17/98)(MC, 9/17/01)

1939 Sep 27, Germany occupied
Warsaw as Poland surrendered after weeks of resistance to invading
forces from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II.
(AP, 9/27/97)(HN, 9/27/98)

1939 Sep 28, The Boundary and
Friendship Treaty between the USSR and Germany was supplemented by
secret protocols to amend the secret protocols of Aug 23. Among
other things Lithuania was reassigned to the Soviet sphere of
influence. Poland’s partition line was moved eastwards from the
Vistula line to the line of the Bug. Germany kept a small part of
south-west Lithuania, the Uznemune region. A separate Soviet mutual
defense pact was signed with Estonia that allowed 25,000 Soviet
troops to be stationed there.
(DrEE, 9/28/96, p.3)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(DrEE,
10/26/96, p.4)

1939 Oct 10, Lithuania signed a
treaty that allowed a Soviet garrison of 20,000 troops to be
stationed in the country in return for Vilnius and other regions
with a population of 600,000.
(DrEE, 10/12/96, p.3)(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)

1939 Nov 30, The Russo-Finnish
war began when Stalin attacked Finland with 4 armies, 540,000 men,
2485 tanks, and 2000 guns. Finnish troops were led by Field Marshall
Gustaf Mannerheim. Over the next two weeks, a greatly outnumbered
Finnish army resisted the invasion of nearly fifty Red Army
divisions--over one million men. The Finnish used forest combat to
inflict heavy damage on the Russian invaders. The British and French
came to the Finnish defense in mid-December but by March, the "Peace
of Moscow" treaty was signed, and Finland ceded 16,000-square miles
of land to the Soviet Union, including the city of Vyborg and the
Karelian Isthmus.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)(AP, 11/30/99)(MC, 12/30/01)

1939 May 23, Dmitri
Shostakovitch was appointed professor at conservatory of Leningrad.
(MC, 5/23/02)

1939 May, In Manchuria a
Japanese punitive attack failed and combined Soviet and Mongolian
forces wiped out a 200-man Japanese unit. This marked the beginning
of the conflict called the Nomonhan Incident by Japanese, the Battle
of Khalkhin Gol by Russians. Gen. Georgy Zhukov destroyed the
Kwantung Army.
(http://tinyurl.com/ml2j3oh)(Econ, 11/7/15, p.79)

1939 Aug 11, Sergei Rachmaninov
had his last appearance in Europe.
(MC, 8/11/02)

1939 Aug 23, German Foreign
Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Commissar for Foreign
Affairs Vyacheslav M. Molotov signed a Treaty of Non-Aggression, the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact freeing Hitler to invade Poland and Stalin
to invade Finland. Secret protocols, made public years later, were
added that assigned Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia to be
within the Soviet sphere of influence. Poland was partitioned along
the rivers Narev, Vistula and San. Germany retained Lithuania
enlarged by the inclusion of Vilnius. Just days after the signing,
Germany invaded Poland, and by the end of September, both powers had
claimed sections of Poland.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A16)(AP, 8/23/97) (HNPD,
8/22/98)(HN, 8/23/98)

1939 Aug, The Soviet Union and
Japan fought a massive tank battle at Khalkhin-Gol on the Mongolian
border. It was the largest armored battle in the world until that
point. By the end of the month the Soviets claimed victory over the
Japanese army at the Khalkhyn Gol river. This helped fend off a
possible Japanese invasion of Russia with Nazi Germany in 1941.
(http://tinyurl.com/mx9xowj)

1939 Sep 15, The Soviet Union
and Japan agreed to a cease-fire in Manchuria (later Mongolia),
which took effect the following day.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol)

1939 Sep 27, Germany occupied
Warsaw. Poland surrendered after 19 days of resistance to invading
forces from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Poland had endured a
brutal 3 day bombing campaign by the German Luftwaffe.
(AP, 9/27/97)(HN, 9/27/98)

1939 Nov 26, Soviets charged
Finland with an artillery attack on border leading to a 105-day
Winter War. Soviet Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov accused Finnish
troops of firing at the Russians across the 800-mile (1,300km)
border near the southeastern village of Mainila.
(AP, 11/26/02)(AP, 11/30/09)

1939 Dec 9, A Russian air raid
was made on Helsinki.
(MC, 12/9/01)

1939 Dec 14, The Soviet Union
was dropped from the League of Nations.
(AP, 12/14/97)

1939 Dec 25, Finnish troops
entered Soviet territory.
(HN, 12/25/98)

1939 Prokofiev arranged the
"Alexander Nevsky Cantata" from music he wrote for Sergei
Eisenstein’s film.
(WSJ, 7/8/96,p.A9)

1939 The USSR census of this
year classified the results and reported 170 million to Stalin.
Census officials responsible for the 1937 census had been shot for
their count of 162 million.
(Econ, 12/22/07, p.99)

1939-1945 Norman Davies covered this period in his
2006 book “Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory." His central
theme was the Western alliance with Stalin and its consequences. In
2012 Max Hastings authored “All Hell Let Loose: The World At War:
1939-1945." On average nearly 30,000 people were killed every day.
(Econ, 11/11/06, p.94)(Econ, 6/9/12, p.87)

1939-1953 This period is covered in Geoffrey
Roberts’ 2007 book: “Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War."
(Econ, 1/6/07, p.68)

1940 Mar 5, Stalin among others
signed an Order for the massacre at Katyn, Poland. Soviet agents
shot 21,768 Polish military officers, intellectuals and priests who
had been taken prisoner during the invasion. Between April and May
some 25,700 (15,000) Polish citizens were massacred by the Soviets
in the Katyn and Miednoje (Mednoye) forests on the outskirts of
Moscow and at Kharkov in western Russia (later Ukraine). Some 14,700
Polish officers were identified by their uniforms. Documents were
made public in 1992 by Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet
leader. They included a letter by Lavrenty Beria, head of the secret
police, recommending the execution of the Polish prisoners of war.
The letter bears the signatures of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and
three other members of the Politburo. Excavations of the sites began
in 1994. 6,313 Polish officers were all shot in the back of the head
near Mednoye. 9,000 Russians were also massacred at the site. In
2008 Andrzej Wajda directed the film “Katyn." In 2004 Russia's top
military prosecutor closed the investigation after concluding that
the massacre did not constitute genocide. In 2009 Russia's Supreme
Court rejected appeals to re-open the investigation. On April 7,
2010, Russian PM Vladimir Putin attended a memorial ceremony. Hours
later he said Stalin had ordered the atrocity as revenge for the
death of Red Army soldiers in Polish prisoner of war camps in 1920.
(AM, Jul/Aug ‘97 p.16)(SFEC, 9/3/00, p.A18)(AP,
3/6/05)(Econ, 6/21/08, p.65)(AP, 1/29/09)(SFC, 4/8/10, p.A2)(AP,
4/28/10)

1940 Mar 10, Mikhail Bulgakov
(b.1891), Russian author, died in Moscow. His novel “The
Master and Margarita," which satirized life under Stalin, was
written between 1928 and the author’s death. It was not published
until 1966-67 in the Russian journal Moskva, with some 60 pages cut.
(Econ, 3/13/04, p.86)(WSJ, 1/3/09, p.W6)

1940 Mar 12, Finland
surrendered to Russia. Finland and the Soviet Union concluded an
armistice during World War II. Fighting between the two countries
flared again the following year.
(HN, 3/12/98)(AP, 3/12/98)

1940 Mar 13, The 105-day war
between Russia and Finland ended with the signing of a treaty in
Moscow. Finland capitulated conditionally to Soviet terms, but
maintains its independence. Some 27,000 Finnish soldiers were killed
and 43,000 wounded in a population of 3.7 million. The Soviet Union
put its losses at 217,500 dead or wounded.
(HN, 3/13/01)(AP, 11/30/09)

1940 May 24, Joseph Brodsky,
author (Less than 1, Nobel 1987), was born in the USSR.
(MC, 5/24/02)

1940 Jun 14, The Soviets
presented an ultimatum to Lithuania that demanded the free entry of
an unlimited number of troops. The government surrendered and Pres.
Smetona left the country.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)

1940 Jun 15, The Soviets
invaded Lithuania.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)

1940 Jun 16, Soviet Foreign
Minister Molotov presented August Rei, Estonia’s envoy in Moscow, an
ultimatum to allow an unlimited number of Soviet troops, which was
accepted. Latvia received a similar ultimatum.
(DrEE, 10/26/96,
p.4)(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)

1940 Jun 18, Soviet occupation
was completed in the Baltics. For the Soviet intrusion into the
German sphere of influence, Stalin compensated Germany with a
payment of 7.5 million gold dollars.
(DrEE, 10/26/96, p.4)

1940 Jun 21, Estonia’s Pres.
Päts appointed a new government led by PM Johannes Vares under
pressure from Andrei Zhdanov, head of the Leningrad branch of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)

1940 Jun 26, The Soviet Union
delivered an ultimatum to Romania and 2 days later occupied
Bessarabia and North Bukovina.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Bessarabia_by_the_Soviet_Union)

1940 Jun 27, USSR returned to
the Gregorian calendar.
(SC, 6/27/02)

1940 Jul 21, The new
USSR-organized parliaments of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania held
simultaneous sessions. They declared their countries to be soviet
socialist republics and applied for admission to the USSR.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)

1940 Aug 3, The Supreme Soviet
officially registered the acceptance of Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania into the USSR.
(SC,
8/3/02)(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)

1940 Aug 20, Ramon Mercador
(Mercader) del Rio, a Spanish Communist, posed as a Canadian
businessman (aka Frank Jackson) and fatally wounded Leon Trotsky
with an alpine ax to the back of the head in Mexico City. Trotsky
died the next day.
(WSJ, 3/29/96, p.A-14)(TMC, 1994, p.1940)(SFC,
7/19/96, p.B1)(HN, 8/20/01)

1940 Aug 21, Leon Trotsky,
exiled Communist revolutionary, died in Mexico City from wounds
inflicted by an assassin the day before. Earlier this year Josef
Grigulevich (27), a Lithuania-born KGB agent, established a safe
house at Zook's Pharmacy in Santa Fe, NM, for the assassins of Leon
Trotsky. The pharmacy, visible in archive photos, was replaced in
1990 by a Haagen-Dazs ice cream shop. Grigulevich was recruited by
Soviet strongman Josef Stalin's secret police as a university
student in Paris and learned the assassin's trade during the Spanish
civil war. He later published 58 books on Latin American history. In
2011 intelligence expert E.B. Held authored "A Spy's Guide to
Albuquerque and Santa Fe."
(AP, 8/21/08)(AFP, 2/4/11)

1940 Aug 25, The ‘parliaments’
of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declared themselves ‘provisional
Supreme Soviets’ and adopted new constitutions that were composed
according to the example of the constitutions of already existing
union republics of the USSR.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)

1940 Aug, The Armies of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were reorganized as territorial rifle
corps of the Red Army and placed under the control of the political
leaders of the Red Army.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)

1941 Jun 13, Thousands of
Jewish community leaders in Bessarabia (Moldova) were deported to
Siberia as part of the general purge. The Soviet Union, which had
occupied the former Romanian province a year earlier, loaded 22,600
Moldovans on cargo trains bound for Siberia, where the deportees
were used for forced labor.
(WSJ, 1/2/02, p.A18)(AP, 6/13/06)

1941 Jun 14, The Russian secret
police gathered up some 40,000 men, women and children and exiled
them to Siberia in cattle cars. This was the first of many
shipments. Some 10,000 Estonians, more than 15,000 Latvians and
between 16,000 and 18,000 Lithuanians were herded onto cattle trains
and transported to the far eastern reaches of the Soviet Union,
where many of them died.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A16)(http://tinyurl.com/5jxmas)
1941 Jun 14, Over 10,000 people
(10,861 according to some sources) were deported as whole families
from Estonia. About 230 Estonian officers serving in the 22nd
Estonian Territorial Corps of the Red Army were imprisoned at the
summer camp of the Estonian Army in southeastern Estonia. Most of
them were sent to the Norilsk prison camp, where most of them either
died or were executed.
(www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions_frame.htm)

1941 Jun 22, German troops
invaded Russia and thereby violated the 1939 Russo-German
non-aggression pact. Under the codename Barbarossa, Germany invaded
the Soviet Union, the largest invasion of another country in
history. In 2005 Constantine Pleshakov authored “Stalin’s Folly,"
and David E. Murphy authored "What Stalin Knew." Both provide
accounts of the invasion and Stalin’s refusal to acknowledge warning
signs.
(AP, 6/22/97)(HN, 6/22/98)(WSJ, 6/22/05, p.D12)
1941 Jun 22, Estonians started
armed resistance against Soviet occupation.
(MC, 6/22/02)
1941 Jun 22, Finland invaded
Karelia. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in summer 1941,
Finland joined in and began re-taking the lost territory.
(www.publiscan.fi/cu13e-9.htm)

1941 Jun 29, Nazi divisions in
a surprise assault made sweeping advances toward Leningrad, Moscow,
and Kiev. Joseph Stalin had ignored warnings that Hitler would
betray the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. Over 500,000 square
miles of Russian territory were taken in the first two months of the
invasion.
(MC, 6/29/02)

1941 Jul 5, German troops
reached the Dnieper River in the Soviet Union.
(HN, 7/5/98)

1941 Jul 12, Moscow was bombed
by the German Luftwaffe for the first time.
(HN, 7/12/98)

1941 Jul 13, Britain and the
Soviet Union signed a mutual aid pact, providing the means for
Britain to send war materiel to the Soviet Union.
(HN, 7/13/98)

1941 Aug 27, The Soviet armada
began to move out of Tallinn. By the next day 5 ships were sunk by
German bombers and Soviet ships began to encounter minefields set by
the Kriegsmarine and Finnish Navy. The Soviets succeeded in
evacuating 165 ships, 28,000 passengers and 66,000 tons of equipment
from Tallinn.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_evacuation_of_Tallinn)

1941 Aug 30, The World War II
siege of Leningrad began as Nazi forces took Mga.
(AP, 8/30/97)

1941 Aug 31, Marina Tsvetaeva
(b.1892), Russian poet and writer, died. She wrote six plays in
verse and narrative poems, including The Tsar Maiden (1920), and her
epic about the Civil War, The Swans' Encampment, which glorified
those who fought against the communists.
(Econ, 3/6/10,
p.103)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Tsvetaeva)

1941 Sep 8, The 900-day Siege
of Leningrad by German forces began during World War II. The Siege
of Leningrad, 400 miles northwest of Moscow, took place with Germany
spread along a 2,000 mile front. It led to the death of at least one
million Russians from starvation and disease. Leningrad was renamed
back to St. Petersburg in 1991. In 2011 Anna Reid authored
“Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II."
(WSJ, 2/21/96, p.A-15)(AP, 9/8/06)(Econ, 8/27/11,
p.73)

1941 Sep 21, The German Army
cut off the Crimean Peninsula from the rest of the Soviet Union.
(HN, 9/21/98)

1941 Sep, Shostakovich, a local
fire warden, composed his Seventh Symphony, the "Leningrad," during
the German siege of his native city.
(SFC, 10/18/96, C9)(WSJ, 6/8/98, p.A21)

1941 Oct 2, Operation Typhoon,
a German all-out drive against Moscow, began in earnest. In 2006
Rodric Braithwaite authored “Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at
War."
(AP,
10/2/97)(http://www.bartcop.com/arc4110.htm)(Econ, 9/23/06, p.95)

1941 Dec 4, Operation Taifun
(Typhoon), which was launched by the German armies on October 2,
1941 as a prelude to taking Moscow, was halted because of freezing
temperatures and lack of serviceable aircraft. Temperatures near
Moscow fell to 40 degrees below zero the breech-blocks of German
rifles froze solid. The engines of their vehicles would not start.
The Soviets began a counter-attack with 17 armies and their T-34
tanks that included 25 Siberian divisions and the Nazis were forced
to retreat in panic.
(SFC,10/29/97, p.A23)(HN, 12/4/98)

1941 The Ballet Company of the
Stanislavsky and Nenmirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theater was
founded.
(WSJ, 1/13/98, p.A20)

1941 The amber room in St.
Petersburg was dismantled by German officers and shipped to
Konigsberg for safekeeping. The Allied bombing in 1945 was thought
to have destroyed the work.
(SFC, 3/22/97, p.A16)

c1941-1945 Russian women combat pilots were called
the "Night Witches" by the Germans they haunted during dark, scary
nights of World War II. The embattled skies of the Soviet Union
regularly saw women proving their worth in combat as bomber, night
bomber and even as fighter pilots.
(HNQ, 2/19/02)

1942 Feb 24, The SS Struma was
sunk in the Black Sea by a Soviet torpedo. The ship with over 750
Jewish passengers fleeing Romania, had docked in Istanbul, but was
denied entry to Palestinian territory by colonial power Britain. On
Feb 23 Turkey towed the vessel to the Black Sea and set it adrift.
Only one person survived.
(AP, 2/24/12)

1942 Feb, The Soviet government
established the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) to drum up
int’l. support as the Red Army struggled against the German
onslaught. As the war progressed the group collected evidence of
atrocities and genocide and planned to publish its “Black Book."
Incomplete versions appeared in the 1980s and the first complete
version was published in Lithuania in 1993. In Russia it was
published as “The Unknown Black Book." In 2008 an English
translation was edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman.
(WSJ, 1/19/08, p.W8)

1942 Spring, Soviet soldiers
retreated for 3 days through a corridor 50-yards wide in the Mysnoi
Bor under constant German shelling. The retreat was from a botched
campaign to free Leningrad, 150 miles to the north. The official
death toll was 20,000, but some claim as many as 300,000.
(WSJ, 10/1/96, p.A20)

1942 Apr 8, The Soviets opened
a rail link to the besieged city of Leningrad.
(HN, 4/8/99)

1942 Apr 20, The battle for
Moscow ended. It officially lasted from September 30, 1941, to April
20, 1942, but in reality spanned more than those 203 days of
unremitting mass murder, and marked the first time that Hitler's
armies failed to triumph with their Blitzkrieg tactics. In 2007
Andrew Nagorski authored “The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and
the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World
War II."
(WSJ, 1/11/08, p.W6)

1942 May 12, The Soviet Army
launched its first major offensive of the war and took Kharkov in
the eastern Ukraine from the German army.
(HN, 5/12/99)

1942 May 29, The German Army
completed its encirclement of the Kharkov region of the Soviet
Union. The Red Army had lost over 250,000 men including many
prisoners.
(HN, 5/29/99)

1942 Jul 24, The Soviet city of
Rostov was captured by German troops.
(HN, 7/24/98)

1942 Jul, Hitler made his
fateful decision to split the armies engaged in the offensive and to
occupy the city of Stalingrad with the weaker of the 2 groups.
(WSJ, 1/14/07, p.P8)

1942 Aug 6, The Soviet city of
Voronezh fell to the German army.
(HN, 8/6/98)

1942 Aug 9, In Russia conductor
Karl Eliasberg led a performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony
in Leningrad as it was besieged by the German army. A day earlier
the Soviet army did a very vicious bombardment of the German army
lines in order to silence the German guns, so the concert could take
place without being interrupted.
(www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34292312)

1942 Apr 18, The 16th plane of
the Doolittle air strike against Japan landed outside Vladivostok in
the Soviet Union following its mission. Nolan Herndon (1918-2007),
the bombardier, later reported that their plane was used to test the
Soviet resolve as an ally. The 5-man crew was held for over 13
months before escaping to a British Embassy in what later became
Iran.
(SFC, 10/16/07, p.D8)

1942 Aug 23, German forces
began an assault on the major Soviet industrial city of Stalingrad.
From Aug. to Feb. 1943, The Battle of Stalingrad, 600 miles
southeast of Moscow, was fought and ended with the encirclement and
destruction of the German 6th Army Group. Stalingrad has since been
renamed to Volgograd. In 1998 Antony Beevor published "Stalingrad:
The Fateful Siege." The German in charge was Gen’l. Friedrich
Paulus. 600 Luftwaffe bombers killed some 40,000 people in the first
week of fighting.
(WSJ, 2/21/96, p.A-15)(WSJ, 7/8/98, p.A13)(HN,
8/23/98)(MC, 8/23/02)

1942 Nov 19, During World War
II, Russian forces launched their winter offensive against the
Germans along the Don front. Soviet forces took the offensive at
Stalingrad
(AP, 11/19/97)(HN, 11/19/98)

1942 Nov 20, The 26th Russian
Armored Corps recaptured Perelazovski. A million Russians breached
German lines in a Soviet army offensive.
(MC, 11/20/01)

1942 Nov 22, Soviet troops
completed the encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad.
(HN, 11/22/98)

1942 Nov 23, Gen. Von Paulus
asked Hitler's permission to surrender at Stalingrad. The German 4th
and 6th Army were surrounded at Stalingrad.
(MC, 11/23/01)

1942 Nov, In Balkaria, Central
Asia, a valley-full of women and children were hunted down in
several villages and butchered by the joint NKVD and Red Army task
force under the command of captain Nakin. This became known as the
Cherek massacre.
(Econ, 4/3/10, p.86)(http://tinyurl.com/y7b5tse)

1942 Dec 22, The Soviets drove
German troops back 15 miles at the Don River.
(HN, 12/22/98)

1943 Jan 25, The last German
airfield in Stalingrad was captured by the Red Army.
(HN, 1/25/99)

1943 Jan 26, Nikolai Vavilov
(b.1887), Soviet botanist, died in prison. In 1929 he had traced the
genealogy of the apple to Kazakhstan.
(SSFC, 5/25/08, Books
p.3)(www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=54)

1943 Jan 30, Field marshal
Friedrich von Paulus surrendered himself and his staff to Red Army
troops in Stalingrad.
(HN, 1/30/99)

1943 Jan 31, The Battle
of Stalingrad ended as small groups of German soldiers of the Sixth
Army under Gen Friedrich von Paulus surrendered to the victorious
Red Army forces.
(HN, 1/31/99)(MC, 1/31/02)

1943 Feb 2, The remainder of
Nazi forces from the Battle of Stalingrad surrendered in a major
World War II victory for the Soviets. 23 generals, 2,000 officers,
and at least 130,000 German troops surrendered. This was later
considered as the turning point of WW II.
(AP, 2/2/97)(HN, 2/2/99)(WSJ, 3/28/03, p.A1)

1943 Feb 3, Finland began talks
with the Soviet Union.
(HN, 2/3/99)

1943 Feb 8, Red Army recaptured
Kursk.
(MC, 2/8/02)

1943 Feb 9, The Russians took
back Kursk 15 months after it fell to the Nazis.
(HN, 2/9/97)

1943 May, German captors took
American POWs Capt. Donald B. Stewart and Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet
Jr. to view mummified corpses of Polish officers massacred in the
Katyn forest. They used coded messages to report on the Soviet
guilt, but it was suppressed by the Roosevelt administration until a
report in 1952. Documents of their coded messages were made public
in 2012.
(AP, 9/10/12)

1943 Jul 5, The battle of
Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, began as German tanks
attacked the Soviet salient.
(HN, 7/5/98)

1943 Jul 6, In the 2nd day of
battle at Kursk some 25,000 Germans were killed.
(MC, 7/6/02)

1943 Sep 25, The Red Army
retook Smolensk from the Germans who were retreating to the Dnieper
River in the Soviet Union. [see Sep 24]
(HN, 9/25/98)

1943 Oct 14, Some 300 of 600
prisoners escaped from the Nazi’s Sobibor death camp in Poland.
Alexander Pechersky, a Russian officer of Jewish origin, roused his
fellow prisoners to rebellion. The event was later documented in the
book "Escape from Sobibor" by Richard Rashke (1982) and the film of
the same name with Alan Arkin. Josef Vallaster, an Austrian guard,
was among 11 SS officers and 11 Ukrainians killed in the escape.
Most of the escaped prisoners were killed as they fled. Only 50
prisoners survived the war. Vallaster had operated the motor that
funneled gas into Sobibor’s shower rooms. After the uprising at
Sobibor, the Nazis shut it down and leveled it to the ground,
replanting over it to cover their tracks.
(SFC, 7/11/03, p.A19)(SSFC, 2/17/08, p.A8)(AP,
8/21/12)(AFP, 10/14/13)

1943 Oct 19, Delegates from the
USSR met with representatives from the Allied nations of Great
Britain, the U.S., and China, in an attempt to hammer out a greater
consensus on war aims, and to improve the rapidly cooling relations
between the Soviet Union and its allies.
(MC, 10/19/01)

1943 Dec 12, The exiled Czech
government signed a treaty with the USSR for postwar cooperation.
(HN, 12/12/98)
1943 Dec 12, The German Army
launched Operation Winter Tempest, the relief of the Sixth Army
trapped in Stalingrad. The attempt to relieve Stalingrad fell short
due to stubborn Soviet resistance and the Germans' indecision within
the besieged city.
(HN, 12/12/98)

1943 Dec 20, "International"
was no longer USSR National Anthem.
(MC, 12/20/01)
1943 Dec 20, Soviet forces
halted a German army trying to relieve the besieged city of
Stalingrad.
(HN, 12/20/98)

1943 Sergei Mikhalkov (96), an
author favored by Stalin, was commissioned to write the lyrics for
the Soviet and Russian national anthems. His lyrics, co-written with
journalist El Registan and set to music by Alexander Alexandrov,
lauded Stalin who "brought us up on loyalty to the people" and
"inspired us to labor and to heroism."
(AP, 8/27/09)
1943 Dmitri Shostakovich
composed his 8th Symphony.
(WSJ, 5/7/02, p.D7)
1943 Russia began producing
palladium in Norilsk.
(WSJ, 3/6/00, p.A1)

1943-1957 The Kalmyks of southern Russia were
banished to Siberia on charges of collaborating with the Nazis. In
their absence their land was overgrazed and turned to desert. In an
attempt to solve the problem the steppe was irrigated with water
from the Volga which brought underlying salt to the surface and
turned some of the land to marsh.
(SFC,11/6/97, p.D2)

1944 Jan 27, The Soviet Union
announced the end of the deadly German siege of Leningrad, which had
lasted 880 days with 600,000 killed.
(AP, 1/27/98)(MC, 1/27/02)

1944 Feb 23, Stalin ordered the
mass deportation Caucasian Muslim nations. Chechens and Ingush to
Kazakhstan were deported for resisting Soviet rule and abetting the
Germans. "478,479 persons were evicted and loaded onto special
railway cars, including 91,250 Ingush." More than a third of the
population died before the rest were allowed to go home. Also
deported were the Karachays, Balkars, and Meskhetian Turks.
(WSJ, 9/12/02, p.A8)(WSJ, 2/23/04, p.A16)(Econ,
2/12/05, p.22)

1944 Mar 8, The Soviet
government celebrated International Women's Day by forcibly
deporting almost the entire Balkar population to Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan and Omsk Oblast in Siberia. Starting on 8 March and
finishing the following day, the NKVD loaded 37,713 Balkars onto 14
train echelons bound for Central Asia and Siberia.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkars)

1944 May 18, The Soviet Union
began the expulsion of more than 200,000 Tartars from Crimea. They
were accused of collaborating with the Germans. Stalin deported some
250,000 Tatars from Crimea to Uzbekistan. They did not being to
return home until the fall of the USSR.
(SC, 5/18/02)(SFC, 1/4/99, p.A8,9)

1944 Jun 29, A Russian assault
battalion opened fire on German forces on the outskirts of Bobruisk,
Belarus. As many as half of the 10,000 German soldiers were killed.
In 1962 Nikolai Litvin, a Russian soldier present that day,
completed his memoir. It was finally published in 2007 under the
title "800 Days on the Eastern Front."
(WSJ, 6/30/07, p.P6)

1944 Jul 31, The Soviet army
took Kovno [Kaunas], the capital of Lithuania.
(HN, 7/31/98)

1944 Aug 21, The US, Britain,
the Soviet Union and China opened the Dumbarton Oaks conference in
Washington, D.C. It laid the foundation for the establishment of the
UN.
(SFEC, 6/29/97, p.T10)(AP, 8/21/07)

1944 Aug 23, Romanian PM Ion
Antonescu was dismissed by King Michael, paving the way for Romania
to abandon the Axis in favor of the Allies. King Michael organized a
coup against the pro-Nazi dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, but was
double-crossed by Joseph Stalin and betrayed by the Allies who ceded
the country to the Russians at the Yalta summit in 1945.
(SFC, 6/27/97, p.A16)(AP, 8/23/97)

1944 Dec 13, Wassily Kandinsky
(b.1866), Russian artist credited with the invention of abstract
art, died in France. He held that shapes and colors in art, like
notes in music, should represent feelings and emotions, not actual
objects.
(WSJ, 8/13/99,
p.W10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Kandinsky)

1944 The Russian film "Ivan the
Terrible" was directed by Sergei Eisenstein with music by Prokofiev.
It was planned as a 3-part epic. Part 2 was released after Stalin’s
death and part 3 was never made.
(SFC,11/1/97, p.E3)
1944 Nikolai Baibakov
(1911-2008) was named Stalin's oil commissioner. He was fired in
1985 by Mikhail Gorbachev, whose economic and social reforms
preceded the Soviet collapse.
(AP,
4/2/08)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Baibakov)
1944 The Soviet army
re-conquered Bessarabia. Only then were the two parts of present-day
Moldova joined together to form the Moldavian SSR. At the same time,
about one-third of Bessarabia, including its entire Black Sea
coastline, was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR. The
Transdniester region, having long been part of the Russian Empire
and then the Soviet Union, remained more Russified and Sovietized
than Right-Bank Moldavia.
(http://tinyurl.com/b7m4b)
1944 Some 150,000 Hungarian
troops fought under Nazi command at the Don River. The Red army
killed about 90,000 and thousands died trying to walk back to
Hungary.
(SFC, 8/12/00, p.A11)
1944 The Soviet Union annexed
Tuva and closed the region to the outside world.
(WSJ, 4/1/06, p.A5)

1944 Vasily Kononov (21) led a
small band of pro-Soviet partisans in Latvia. He was arrested in
1998 for ordering the execution of 9 civilians in the village of
Mazie Bati, whom he suspected of pro-Nazi sympathies, but maintained
his innocence. In 2000 Latvia sentenced Kononov to 6 years in prison
but he was soon freed pending further investigation. Russian
president Vladimir Putin granted Kononov Russian citizenship.
(SFC, 4/26/00, p.A16)